It has become commonplace to search large collections of electronic records for items of interest. Such items may be associated with one or more colors. For example, the items may include physical objects having a primary color and one or more secondary colors. Accordingly, it may be desirable to search by item color as well as other item attributes. However, conventional solutions that facilitate searching by item color have shortcomings.
Some conventional solutions require that one or more colors associated with an item be manually described with one or more words of a language such as English. Such manual description of item colors can be labor intensive and error prone. In addition, the words chosen by one person to describe a color of an item are not necessarily the words that will be chosen by another person searching for items of that color. For example, “purple” and “violet” might be used by different people to describe the same color.
Now it is not uncommon for electronic records to include images of the items of interest, for example, digitized color photographs of various items, objects, or other suitable content. Such images may include many pixels each having a color, which is commonly chosen from one of a number of high resolution color spaces. A 32-bit color space has over 4 billion colors, and even a 16-bit color space has over 65 thousand colors. Although a person searching may think of, for example, an apple as red or green, digital photographs of apples may include thousands of shades of red, green, blue and yellow depending on, for example, lighting and background. A naïve implementation of a color-aware search of such images may produce results that are unsatisfactory, unexpected and/or confusing for a search system user.
Neither is the user interface to such a search system necessarily straightforward. Some conventional solutions provide a presentation of the entire color space. However, for many users, such a presentation is unnatural and/or difficult to use to obtain results that, again, are not unsatisfactory, unexpected and/or confusing. For some search applications, user frustration may have significant negative consequences, for example, negative commercial consequences including loss of a sale.
Same numbers are used throughout the disclosure and figures to reference like components and features, but such repetition of number is for purposes of simplicity of explanation and understanding, and should not be viewed as a limitation on the various embodiments.